Popular Music from Vittula (6 page)

Once the immediate paralysis began to wear off, I started screaming. The echo magnified my voice. I stuck my fingers in my ears and yelled out over and over again.

But nobody came.

Hoarse and exhausted, I collapsed in a heap. Was I doomed to die? Die of thirst, shrivel up in my iron sarcophagus?

The first day was awful. My muscles ached, I had cramps in my legs. I had no option but to sit curled up, and my back grew stiff. Thirst was driving me mad. The heat given off by my body condensed on the sooty walls, I could feel it dripping and tried to lick it. It tasted metallic, and only made me feel even more thirsty.

The second day I was completely overcome by exhaustion. I dozed for hour after hour. The emptiness felt liberating. I lost all trace of time. I slid in and out of contented oblivion and realized I was dying.

The next time I came to my senses it was obvious that a considerable length of time had passed. The greenish light of day that seeped in through the ventilator was fainter now. Days were growing shorter. It was getting much colder at night, and soon there was frost as well. I kept warm by jerking my muscles one after another.

I don’t remember much of winter. I curled up in a ball and slept most of the time. I was in a trance as weeks passed by. When the spring
warmth finally returned, I discovered I had grown. My clothes felt tight and uncomfortable. I wriggled and squiggled and managed to take them off, and resumed my waiting, naked.

Gradually my body filled more and more of the cramped space. Several years must have passed. The damp given off by my body had started the iron rusting, and I had flakes of rust in my tousled hair. I could no longer move up and down, only sway from side to side like a duck. If the doors were to open now, the hole would be too small for me to climb out anyway.

Eventually it became almost unbearable. I couldn’t even move from side to side any more. My head was jammed in between my knees. There was no room for my shoulders to grow any broader.

For several weeks I was convinced it was all over.

In the end everything came to a full stop. I occupied the whole of the space. There was no room to breathe properly any more, all I could manage was a series of short gasps. But I kept growing even so.

Then it happened one night. A faint cracking noise. Like when a pocket mirror breaks. A brief pause, then a slow crunching noise from behind me. When I tensed my muscles and pressed backward, the wall gave way. Bulged out, then burst open in a cloud of splinters, and I shot out into the world.

Naked, newly born, I crawled around through the rubbish. Stood up on very shaky legs and supported myself against a bookcase. To my surprise, I noticed that the whole world had shrunk. No, it was me who’d doubled in size. I’d sprouted pubic hair. I’d grown up.

It was a bitterly cold winter night outside. Not a soul in sight. I plowed my way through the snow and scampered barefoot through the village, still stark naked. At the crossroads between the chemist’s and the newsstand, four youths were lying in the middle of the road. They seemed to be asleep. I stopped and stared down at them in surprise. Bent down to examine them more closely in the light from the street lamp.

One of the youths was me.

Feeling very odd, I lay down next to myself on the icy road. It was cold against my skin, melted and turned damp.

I started to wait. They’d wake up soon enough.

In which the village children start at the Old School and learn about southern Sweden, and a homework session ends in a hell of a row

One overcast morning in August the bell rang, and I started school. Class one. Mum and I marched solemnly into the tall, yellow-painted wooden building that housed the infants’ section—an old school imaginatively named the Old School. We were piloted up a creaky staircase and into a classroom on the first floor, strode over broad, yellowed floorboards with a thick, shiny coat of varnish, and were each shepherded behind an antique school desk with a wooden lid, a pen box, and a hole for an inkwell. The lid was covered in carvings made by the knives of generations of pupils. The mums all trooped out, and we were left behind. Twenty kids with loose milk teeth and knuckles covered in warts. Some had speech defects, others wore glasses, many spoke Finnish at home, several were used to receiving a good beating if they stepped out of line, nearly everybody was shy and came from working-class homes, and knew from the start they didn’t belong here.

Our teacher was a matron in her sixties with round, steel-framed glasses, her hair in a bun contained by a net and pierced with pins, and she had a long, hooked nose that made her look like an owl. She always
wore a woolen skirt and a blouse, often a cardigan buttoned halfway up, and soft, black shoes like slippers. She approached her duties gently but firmly, intent on carving out of the roughly sawed planks confronting her something neat and presentable, and capable of coping with Swedish society.

To begin with, we all had to go to the blackboard and write our names. Some could, others couldn’t. On the basis of that scientific test, our teacher divided the class into two groups, called Group One and Group Two. Group One comprised all those who had passed the test—most of the girls and a few sons of civil service clerks. The rest were in Group Two, including Niila and me. We were only seven, but correctly classified right from the start.

Hanging from the wall in front of the class were the Letters of the Alphabet. A scary army of sticks and half-moons stretching all the way across. Those were the things we were required to wrestle with, one after another: force them down on their backs in our notebooks and make them do as they were told. We were given pencils as well, and chalks in a cardboard box, a reading book about Li and Lo, and a stiff sheet of cardboard with blocks of water-color paints that looked like brightly colored sweets. Then we had to get down to work. The inside of the desk had to be lined with paper, and the books as well: there was a deafening crackling and rustling from the rolls of wax paper we’d brought from home, and some eager snipping with blunt school scissors. Finally we stuck a timetable onto the inside of our desk lids with tape. Nobody had the slightest inkling what all those mysterious squares actually meant, but the timetable was an essential part of things, part of being Neat and Orderly, and it meant our childhood was over. Now we were faced with a six-day week with school from Monday to Saturday, and on the seventh day there was Sunday School for those who hadn’t had enough of it.

Neat and Orderly. Stand in a line outside the hall when the bell rang for lessons. Walk in a line to the canteen, with the teacher at the front.
Raise your hand whenever you wanted to speak. Raise your hand whenever you wanted to leave the room for a pee. Turn the punched holes in your paper toward the windows on your left. Go out into the playground the moment the bell rang for break. Go back in the moment the bell rang for lessons. Everything done in that typically calm, Swedish manner, and only rarely was it necessary for some cheeky oaf in Group Two to have his hair tweaked by pincer-like magisterial talons. We liked our teacher. She really knew how to turn you into an adult.

Right at the front, next to teacher’s desk, was the harmonium. It was used every morning when she took attendance and we sang hymns. She’d sit down on the stool and start pedalling away. Her fat calves bulged inside her beige knee-length stockings, her glasses misted over, she spread her gnarled fingers over the keyboard, and gave us a chord. Then a quivering dowager-soprano, with stern glances to left and right, making sure we were all joining in. Sunlight seeping in through the window panes, yellow and warm over the nearest desks. The smell of chalk. The map of Sweden. Mikael, who suffered from nosebleeds and sat with his head leaned back, clutching a roll of paper towels. Kennet, who could never sit still. Annika, who always spoke in a whisper, and with whom all the boys were in love. Stefan, who was brilliant at football but would ski into a tree on the Yllästunturi slalom slope three years later and kill himself. And Tore and Anders and Eva and Åsa and Anna-Karin and Bengt, and all the rest of us.

As a citizen of Pajala, you were inferior—that was clear from the very beginning. Skåne, in the far south, came first in the atlas, printed on an extra-large scale, completely covered in red lines denoting main roads and black dots representing towns and villages. Then came the other provinces on a normal scale, moving farther north page by page. Last of all was Northern Norrland, on an extra-small scale in order to fit onto the page, but even so there were hardly any dots at all. Almost at the very top of the map was Pajala, surrounded by brown-colored tundra, and that was where we lived. If you turned back to the front you
could see that Skåne was in fact the same size as Northern Norrland, but colored green by all that confoundedly fertile farming land. It was many years before the penny dropped and I realized that Skåne, the whole of our most southerly province, would fit comfortably between Haparanda and Boden.

We had to learn that Kinnekulle was 1,004 feet above sea level. But not a word about Käymävaara, 1,145 feet high. We had to be able to ramble on about the Viska, the Ätra, the Vomit, and the Bile (or whatever they were called), four colossal rivers that flowed from the southern Swedish highlands. Many years later I saw them with my own eyes. I felt obliged to stop the car, get out, and give my eyes a good rub. Ditches. Tiny little brooks barely deep enough to paddle in. No bigger than Kaunisjoki or Liviöjoki.

I felt similarly alienated when it came to culture.

“Have you seen Mr. Chantarelle?” our reader asked us.

I could answer that question with an outright “no.” Nor Mrs. Chantarelle, nor any other members of the family, come to that. Chantarelles didn’t grow in our part of the world.

We sometimes used to receive
Treasure Trove
, the savings bank magazine, with a picture of the bank’s oak tree logo. If we saved our money, it would grow and grow until it was as big as that majestic old oak, we were told. But there were no oak trees around Pajala, and so we realized there was something fishy about the ad. The same sort of things applied to the
Treasure Trove
crossword, where one of the clues that kept cropping up was a tall tree similar to a cypress, seven letters. Answer: juniper. But where we lived the juniper was a straggly little bush about knee-high.

Music lessons were a fascinating ritual. Our teacher would produce a big, clumsy tape recorder and put it on her desk—a gigantic chest dotted with spikes and knobs. She would slowly thread in and set up a tape, then hand out song books. Peer at the class with her owlish eyes, and switch the recorder on. The reels would start turning, then a bright and breezy signature tune would blare out from the loudspeakers. A
brisk female voice spouting something or other in a Stockholm accent. The voice would go on to give us a perfect music lesson, peppered with sighs and squeals of enthusiasm. The pupils on the tape were from the Nacka School of Music in Stockholm, and to this very day I wonder why we were forced to listen to these southerners with angelic voices singing about bluebells and cowslips and other tropical vegetation. Sometimes one of the Nacka pupils would sing a solo, and the worst thing was that one of the boys had the same name as me.

“Now, repeat that tune for me, Matthias,” the lady would chirrup, and a girlish boy soprano would ring out as clear as a bell. At which point the whole of our class would turn around to stare at me, grinning and giggling. I wished I could have gone up in smoke.

After several pedagogical repetitions, we were expected to sing along with the tape—the Kermit the Frog Ensemble joins the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Our teacher’s eyes took on a glint of steel, and the girls started to sing softly like the soughing of zephyrs through tufts of grass. But we boys stayed as silent as fish, moving our lips when our teacher glared at us, but that was all. Singing was unmanly.
Knapsu
. And so we kept quiet.

We gradually caught on to the fact that where we lived wasn’t really a part of Sweden. We’d just been sort of tagged on by accident. A northern appendage, a few barren bogs where a few people happened to live, but could only partly be Swedes. We were different, a bit inferior, a bit uneducated, a bit simple-minded. We didn’t have any deer or hedgehogs or nightingales. We didn’t have any celebrities. We didn’t have any theme parks. No traffic lights, no mansions, no country squires. All we had was masses and masses of mosquitoes, Tornedalen-Finnish swearwords, and Communists.

Ours was a childhood of deprivation. Not material deprivation—we had enough to get by on—but a lack of identity. We were nobody. Our parents were nobody. Our forefathers had made no mark whatsoever on Swedish history. Our last names were unspellable, not to mention being unpronounceable for the few substitute teachers who found their
way up north from the real Sweden. None of us dared write in to
Children’s Family Favorites
because Swedish Radio would think we were Finns. Our home villages were too small to appear on maps. We could barely support ourselves, but had to depend on state handouts. We watched family farms die, and fields give way to undergrowth. We watched the last logs floating down the River Torne when the ice melted, before it was banned; we saw forty muscular lumberjacks replaced by one diesel-oozing snowmobile; we watched our fathers hang up their heavy-duty gloves and go off to spend their working week in the far-distant Kiruna mines. Our school exam results were the worst in the whole country. We had no table manners. We wore woolly hats indoors. We never picked mushrooms, avoided vegetables, never held crayfish parties. We were useless at conversation, reciting poems, wrapping presents, and giving speeches. We walked with our toes turned out. We spoke with a Finnish accent without being Finnish, and we spoke with a Swedish accent without being Swedish.

We were nothing.

There was only one way out. Only one possibility if you wanted to be something, no matter how insignificant. You had to live somewhere else. We learned to look forward to moving, convinced it was our only chance in life, and so we moved. In Västerås you could be a person at last. In Lund. In Södertälje. In Arvika. In Borås. There was an enormous evacuation. A flood of refugees that emptied our village, but strangely enough it felt voluntary. A phoney war.